Altenhundem – Birkelbach railway line
| Lennestadt-Altenhundem-Birkelbach | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Route number (DB) : | 2863 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Course book range : | 239b (1959) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gauge : | 1435 mm ( standard gauge ) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The Altenhundem – Birkelbach railway is a former railway line from Altenhundem , now part of Lennestadt, to Birkelbach , now part of Erndtebrück , in North Rhine-Westphalia .
Beginning
The line was intended as a connection between the Ruhr-Sieg line and the Main-Weser railway and should lead from Altenhundem to Erndtebrück. In 1901, the municipalities of Bad Berleburg , Erndtebrück and Kirchhundem submitted an application to build the line at state expense. Since the application was rejected on June 9, 1901, the Olpe district and the municipalities of the Kirchhundem office agreed to cover the costs. In 1905 the responsible ministry was ready to examine the application in more detail.
On December 5, 1905, the Royal Railway Directorate Elberfeld announced that the preparatory work for a secondary railway from Altenhundem to Birkelbach through the communities of Kirchhundem, Oberhundem , Kohlhagen and Heinsberg (Westf) of the Olpe district and the communities of Birkelbach and Womelsdorf of the Wittgenstein district should begin . The construction costs were finally approved on May 29, 1907. In 1910 the construction of the Altenhundem – Heinsberg section began, the opening of this first section took place on June 30, 1914 at 9:20 am with a military concert and the opening trip from Erndtebrück to Altenhundem. After seven years of construction, the route was open to traffic in 1917. The trains took around 52 minutes to travel the 26.3 km long route. Altenhundem station gained great importance with the opening of the Altenhundem – Wenholthausen railway line in 1887 and the construction of the line to Erndtebrück, and Altenhundem advanced to become a railway village .
The End
In the 1944 timetable, three pairs of passenger trains were shown daily over the entire route, and four pairs of trains between Altenhundem and Heinsberg on weekdays. The suspension of traffic on the Würdinghausen – Röspe line was ordered on October 1, 1944 by the Reichsbahndirektion Wuppertal. After only militarily significant trains ran on the line in the following period, the viaduct and the station in Röspe were blown up on Easter Monday 1945. After the blast, the only tunnel on the line, the Heinsberger Tunnel , was shut down.
Passenger traffic between Altenhundem and Würdinghausen took place until May 31, 1959, freight traffic remained until December 31, 1980. After attempts in the 1960s to reactivate the line failed, the Deutsche Bundesbahn let the facilities fall into disrepair. On February 15, 1997, the Böminghausen viaduct was also blown up. One of the last remaining bridges on this route is the Heitmickebrücke in Kirchhundem, which was registered in 2006 as a monument in the monuments list of the Kirchhundem municipality. Other architectural monuments are the former Kirchhundem-Flape train station, the aqueduct near Heinsberg and the tunnel portals of the Heinsberg tunnel.
Others
The station building in Röspe, which was destroyed in 1945, was structurally identical to the service building of the Rebbelroth stop, which was operated until 1921, on the Aggertalbahn between Dieringhausen and Olpe, which was built at the same time .
literature
- Paul Friedrich: Erndtebrück - the village of the railway workers in Erndtebrück, a home book of the upper Edertal Volume 2, p. 248 ff., Edited by Werner Wied on behalf of the Erndtebrück hunting association, Erndtebrück 1977, self-published by the Erndtebrück hunting association.
- Edgar Dietrich: Erndtebrück, 100 years of the railway junction, the village of the railway workers , Geiger Verlag, Horb am Neckar, 1988, ISBN 3-89264-283-4 .
- Peter Schneider: Spies in the Sky, Allied aerial reconnaissance in the Wittgenstein area during and after the Second World War. Erndtebrück 1996, ISBN 3-87816-092-5 .
- Martin Vormberg: The Altenhundem – Birkelbach branch in Alfred Bruns (ed.): The railway in the Sauerland , p. 98 ff., Published by the Schmallenberg-Holthausen Slate Mining and Local History Museum, 1989, ISBN 3-922659-63-2 .
- Martin Vormberg: The railway lines in Günther Becker and Martin Vormberg: Kirchhundem, history of the office and the community , p. 225 ff., Publisher of the community director of the community Kirchhundem, Kirchhundem 1994, ISBN 3-923483-15-5 .
- Martin Vormberg: The Altenhundem – Birkelbach branch in: Heinsberg. A village in the Sauerland. Edited by the working group “Our village should become more beautiful”. Heinsberg 1995.
Web links
- Altenhundem – Birkelbach railway line
- NRWbahnarchiv by André Joost: Line 2863 : Altenhundem ↔ Birkelbach